Image sensor market improves

With the explosion in video surveillance and cell phone cameras, you'd expect the image sensor market to be doing well.

With the explosion in video surveillance and cell phone cameras, you'd think the image sensor market was doing well. It is, but only after a rocky 2007 in which image sensor sales actually declined, says IC Insights. Of course, CMOS sensors are on the rise, while the more costly (and arguably higher quality) CCDs are not quite as hot.

There's an interesting distinction between these two big, yet very different markets for image sensors: Consumers tend to replace their handsets every year or two -- the camera phone is nearly disposable. Surveillance cameras, by contrast, tend to get installed and stay there for a very long time, sometimes even for decades.